Druid Related Changes & Blue Posts, Cata Beta Build 12759

Relics changes in Cataclysm

The “on paper” design of the Lich King relics sounds pretty cool: you have your choice of which of your spells or abilities you care about the most. Maybe a Resto druid takes the Rejuv idol over the Regrowth idol. In reality, what happens is that we make 3 druid idols per tier so the Resto druid is stuck with whatever idol we make. If we make the Rejuv idol, awesome. If we make the Lifebloom idol, probably less awesome (or at least much more situational). Of course we could just make the Rejuv idol every tier, but really that’s not much different than the stats. The procs are designed to mostly be always up, so it’s just clutter in the buff section of your UI.

With the new model, there is less risk of having the “bad luck” of having a bad relic for an entire tier for your spec. In fact, it should even offer a little more choice because you could choose the crit relic over the haste relic. Currently you don’t get a choice because we have to offer such specialized relics. The gem socket is to make them at least feel slightly different from the ranged items that can shoot.

To be brutally honest, I wouldn’t call our ranged weapon slot a success for any class. Warriors, rogues and all wand users don’t care much about their ranged weapon slot except as a stat stick. Warriors and rogues use their ranged weapons once in awhile, but we really don’t like the model where a caster wands everything while leveling instead of using their actual spells. The only class that really cares about the ranged slot is the hunter, and they in turn don’t care much about their melee weapon. Furthermore, the hunter doesn’t get the same kind of stat budget out of their primary weapon that the melee guys do. Believe me, we have had many meetings just to discuss the ranged slot. We don’t have a solution yet that we think is better than the current Cataclysm implementation, but it’s the kind of thing we’re going to keep working on for a long time.

Restoration

As far as the history goes here, we thought at the time (and still think!) that the Resto druid wasn’t going to be well served as a “I only care about hots and nothing else” healer. It’s just too extreme a design. Any time when hots are good (by which I mean both individual encounters and periods in the game as a whole) the druid is going to dominate. Any time when hots are terrible, so will be druids. We probably, in retrospect, didn’t push Nourish enough, because we still ended up in a raid healing situation where druids used Rejuv and Wild Growth and were loathe to use any other button.

We are going to push even harder in Cataclysm. Druids will still have exceptional hots, but will need to cast direct heals as well. I usually get a lot of responses after such a post from druids saying “But I only want to cast hots!” I’m not sure how to respond to that, because we just don’t think it works. :( 

As far as the AE healing goes, it’s definitely something to keep an eye on, but we’re not worried about it yet. We are trying to cut back (yet again) on the dominance of the smart AE heals. The cooldowns of CoH and WG need to stay high. We do have some room to lower the mana cost on WG, and probably will.

It’s also worth mentioning that Efflorescence does some great AE healing, and is probably overpowered at the moment.

One change we are going to make is reintroducing the talent that lowers Rejuv to a 1 sec GCD. Since haste affects Rejuv ticks and since druids will be casting cast-time spells that benefit from haste, we’re not as worried about druids turning up their noses at haste. This will let you get Rejuvs up on more people when you want to, though it still should be mana-inefficient to just do so at random. We think hots are going to be enormous in the Cataclysm healing model just because they won’t be overhealing nearly as much as they are now.

We like the way Nourish interacts with hots. Yes, it’s different from the way priests, paladins and shaman use their heals, but we do want the classes to play differently, as long as those differences aren’t so extreme that you can’t use a druid on some dungeon or raid fights.

I suspect we won’t end up keeping the snare on Tree of Life. We knew that we could try snare and then remove it. We would have a hard time trying no snare and then adding one. Our intent was to make you think about when was the best time to push ToL rather that just hitting it the second it’s off cooldown. In practice though we just think it feels crappy so even if it accomplishes our goal, it’s probably not worth it.

We’re still working on the Resto tree (and druids in general). You were missing the talent to lower the cast time of Nourish and Healing Touch, which is a pretty painful thing to live without. We’re also considering changing Furor to provide intellect to caster form too so it is attractive to both caster trees. We agree that too much of the early Resto tree felt like it was there for Feral.

I’m talking PvE in almost all of this, since that was the original thrust of the thread.